The festival survival guide: how to survive 20 drams

The usual story

You walk into a room with five hundred bottles of open whisky. Your eyes go wide. Excitement takes over. You hit every booth like it's the last day on earth. By two your tongue is numb. By four you're looking for a bench. By seven you can't remember a single distillery.

Sound familiar. Whether you're at Spirit of Speyside, Fife Whisky Festival, or Fèis Ìle on Islay, the rules are the same.

Eat before you arrive

The mistake is turning up on an empty stomach or eating a piece of toast and calling it breakfast.

You need carbs and fats to slow alcohol absorption. A full Scottish breakfast. Pasta at lunch. A proper sandwich at a push. Anything substantial.

Alcohol on an empty stomach hits the bloodstream fast. Your palate goes numb, your judgement goes fuzzy, and by one in the afternoon you've wasted forty quid of samples.

Pro tip. Eat a heavy lunch before you walk in and once you're inside, you'll be too busy tasting to stop.

Water between every dram

For every dram you taste, drink an equal amount of water.

Alcohol dehydrates your tongue and a dry tongue stops tasting flavour. By your fifth whisky you're tasting only booze instead of smoke and citrus.

Most festivals have water stations. Use them, aggressively, between every single tasting. A side benefit is that water slows you down, which is exactly what you want.

Spit, or at least dump

Wine tasters spit. Whisky tasters act like it's a war crime. It isn't.

Twenty samples at twenty five millilitres each is half a bottle. In two hours this is a drinking contest rather than a tasting session.

Taste the whisky and enjoy the palate and the finish. Then spit into the spittoon, or pour the rest into the dump jug if spitting isn't for you. You don't have to finish every glass because it was free.

Make a hit list before you go

"I'll wander around and see what looks good."

In reality you might end up queueing twenty minutes for a distillery you don't even like while the rare cask strength release two booths over sells out.

Before you arrive, pick five must try distilleries from the exhibitor list. Hit them first while your palate is still fresh, roughly ten to twelve. Wander after that, when the stakes are lower.

Use Dramfly to log your drams and come back to them later. If you don't track it, you'll forget half of them before lunch.

Reset your nose when it goes blind

After six peated whiskies in a row, your nose gives up. Everything starts tasting the same. That's olfactory fatigue, and the fix is simple.

Smell your own forearm or the back of your hand. Seriously. Your skin's natural scent acts as a neutral reset for your nose, the same way coffee beans work in perfume shops. Two or three sniffs, then back to the glass. You'll smell it clearly again.

Log as you go, not at the end

You'll forget eighty percent of what you taste within forty eight hours. That glorious smoky one from the corner booth, gone. That sherry bomb you loved, no idea what it was called.

Log on the spot. Snap a photo of the bottle. Tap a few flavour tags. Pick a first impression. Dramfly is built for this exact moment, fifteen seconds of attention while you're three drams deep and your handwriting has already given up.

When you're shopping later, or telling friends what to try on the way home, you'll have the answer on your phone.

Pace, not race

Festivals aren't sprints. They're endurance events. Pace yourself. Hydrate. Spit. Plan. If you see us at the next one, we'll be the people holding Glencairns, sipping water, and logging in the app while everyone else queues for their fifteenth dram.

See you in the queue.